Merchant Atlas Unveils Smart Leads Sales Automation Platform

By Nathan Eddy |
Posted 2013-04-22

Digital media sales software specialist Merchant Atlas announced the beta launch of Smart Leads, a platform as a service designed to leverage big data and machine learning to deliver merchant leads to content publishers.

The Smart Leads platform collects, cleanses and interprets local merchant data, assigning each lead a quality score. The overall Merchant Atlas platform oversees the end-to-end process of attracting, closing and monetizing new merchants for digital content publishers, ranging from online media publishers and major search engines, to the diverse array of online and mobile app publishers.

Filtering features in Smart Leads, the first module of the Merchant Atlas platform, are designed to enable a content publisher to discover high-probability leads that best match its ideal customer profile. These filters include merchant marketing investment history on advertising and deals and offers, merchant location and decision-maker contact information, and categories and industry verticals for individual merchants.

Other filters offer information regarding the commercial density of the merchant location, customer demographics, including age by gender, ethnicity and median income, as well as the merchant's customer spend, such as average bill per person, price range or high-end price. In addition, the platform provides the user with a lead quality score to help a publisher assess whether to add a merchant to its call list.

"Smart Leads are more effective than traditional digital leads because they contain verified data about each merchant that increases engagement, reduces marketing cost and streamlines the conversion process," a company white paper explained. "Powerful machine-learning techniques and advanced analytics enable Smart Leads to filter out businesses that will waste marketing time and effort."

Users can also use a Web browser view or download the tailored list of leads to a comma-separated values (CSV) or Excel spreadsheet. Other features include integration with the Salesforce.com customer relationship management (CRM) platform, and Merchant Atlas maintains all of their data and an organization’s smart leads in the cloud as an additional layer of security and protection against lost data.

"Smart Leads essentially does more homework on each merchant than any research or sales team ever could," Antonio Vitti, CEO and co-founder of Merchant Atlas, said in a statement. "It increases sales efficiency by reducing the time devoted to building leads lists. And because Smart Leads are customized to a publisher's ideal customer profile and derived from our high-quality merchant intelligence data, publishers can expect conversion rates of 10 to 20 percent or better, far outpacing traditional sales force conversions at a fraction of the cost."

The second Merchant Atlas module, Smart Engage, is planned for release later this year. Smart Engage is a virtual sales automation platform engineered to help organizations solve the challenges of selling digital media products and services to the local and small and midsize business (SMB) marketplace.